What Makes Charitable Crowdfunding Projects Successful: A Research Based on Data Mining and Social Capital Theory

Abstract

The charitable crowdfunding platforms, as a new model for donation, enable fund seekers to solicit funds from the public over the Internet. Despite of the rapid development of crowdfunding platforms, knowledge about charitable crowdfunding remains obscure. Few studies have investigated the determinants of charitable crowdfunding projects’ success. In this paper, we adopt data mining techniques to collect data from ZhongChou platform, an important crowdfunding website in China. The theoretical foundation of our research model is social capital theory. Our question is what factors can affect the success of charitable crowdfunding projects. The findings show that the more structural social capital the fundraisers have, the high success rate the project will achieve. Besides, frequent updates on project progress can attract more supporters and more donation. More comments and more followers can attract more supporters, but have no significant impact on attracting more donation.

Choy, K., Schlagwein, D.: Crowdsourcing for a better world: on the relation between IT affordances and donor motivations in charitable crowdfunding. Inf. Technol. People 29(1), 221–247 (2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar